If EBM is the answer, what was the question

If EBM is the answer, what was the question? Who asked it? When?

Although Archie Cochrane is implicated in this process, he didn't spearhead the current rise of RCT in the NHS, and amongst those that did, few mention the man. It was as if it emerged out of nowhere, attached to no-one.

For some bizarre reason, EBM has not become a new science. Instead it has become entangled in politics and is best understood as a rhetorical phrase.  

The phrase has power to hypnotize people. In the particular arrangement of the NHS, the Government and the University sector, it has become a key phrase which is shaping people's livelihoods, money, and jobs. 

Whatever Evidence Based Medicine might have been, it has become the rallying cry in a strange kind of paradigm war. Intended or otherwise, under the banner of EBM a backward step is being taken.

The war is odd tho. Instead of finding pioneering scientists championing new ideas and new ways of doing things, we find bureaucratic systems, and an apparent army of nameless automatons.